I tried eating according to U.S. Dietary Guidelines for one month
Most Americans are familiar with the old food guide pyramid and the more recent MyPlate, but I’ve never given those infographics much more of a cursory thought when it came to deciding the healthiest diet for myself. When I search “healthiest diet”, the published U.S Dietary Guidelines for Americans does not come up on my first page of results and has never been mentioned to me as a path to follow. As I’m sure millions of dollars and lot of man-hours go into drafting these guidelines every five years, I decided to try their recommendations for four weeks to see how easy they were to implement and if it could have a positive impact on my health.
Spoiler alert: I failed.
To provide a short background, the USDA published their first Dietary Guidelines for Americans back in 1980 and continues to update the guidelines every five years to, in their words, provide “science-based advice on what to eat and drink to promote health, reduce risk of chronic disease, and meet nutrient needs” (link). As an aside, I find it fascinating that as humans we understand the healthiest diet to feed other animals such as gorillas, tigers, and koalas, and yet, we still modify and incorporate recent studies to define what’s best for the ideal human diet. I understand nutrition is a complicated subject and I assume because humans can function as omnivores, herbivores, or carnivores, that defining what’s best can still be debated, but…it’s been millions of years. Moving on.
The U.S. Dietary Guidelines that are handed down every five years do have an effect on many of us as they are then flowed down and implemented into our school systems, local governments, and pushed into the food industry to influence changes of what we consume at the individual level. The USDA’s stated goal of encouraging Americans to make healthy changes, even if starting small, to promote health and prevent disease is an admirable goal and one that’s clearly needed as we, the general public, continue to move in the opposite direction toward an ever-increasing percent of us suffering from chronic diseases.
The leading cause of death and disability in America are chronic diseases with 6 in 10 of us having at least one and 4 in 10 adults having two or more (Chronic Diseases in America | CDC). Poor nutrition and lack of physical activity are two of the main contributors toward this unhealthy decline. The government admits that we “have fallen far short of meeting its recommendations, and diet-related chronic disease rates have risen to pervasive levels and continue to be a major public health concern” (link).
Table I-1 on page 18 “Facts About Nutrition-Related Health Conditions in the United States” sums of many of the health issues we are facing as a society.